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Topic: Roommate Hell..... (Read 60468 times)

I worked at a US National Park for several years. In the first year I had a roommate in a tent cablin that had all her food for the summer in cans under her bed and who talked to her cats that weren't there...

My roommate when I was 19..How to I state this? Let's just say that her body was not a temple and everyone, EVERYONE was allowed to worship at her private services. She had so many seriously gross, shady, dangerous men over night after night that I installed a lock on my door. Unfortunately I couldn't be there all the time to keep an eye on my things and the sort of men she would bring over were the type to either steal or break everything that wasn't locked down and some things that were. I came home from vacation to find my VCR (yes, this was many years ago) completely dismantled and my computer had obviously been messed with. Her story? "Well, "Matt" wanted to take it apart, and it's not like I could do anything to stop him." Lovely.

Due to her fondness of such men (In reality, she just wanted to upset her parents for some reason), we often had people driving by the house shouting violent threats, knocking on our door at all hours looking for Flavor of the Night, showing out at our workplaces looking for Flavor of the Night (?) and many other charming incidents. I finally had enough after 6 months and moved back in with my parents.

Logged

Don't fear god;Don't worry about death;What is good is easy to get;What is difficult is easy to endure.

I've had a slew of roommates over the years, but since I'm annoyed at one of my current ones, he gets put up in Roommate Hell.

He's one of the most unclean people I've ever met. When he first moved in, he left all his clothes in our living room for a week. His GF would come and stay in our flat for days on end(no idea where she lived or what she looked like), which isn't bad except none of us had ever met her, and she wouldn't use the bathroom or kitchen unless she knew we were in our rooms or out. He also leaves dishes in the sink for WEEKS.

Some of these habits are getting broken from my other flatmate yelling at him, but his latest trick? Throwing cigarette butts in the toilet, and our building has plumbing older than the Stone Age. Guess who always has to unclog it, even if it has...other stuff in it?

My very worst roommate ever was a guy my other roommate, Beth, and I decided to rent with. Oh man. He looked awesome on paper. Good job. Often went Other City where his girlfriend lived on the weekends. Told us he lived with his sister 'the neat freak' for a while so he knew how to clean up after himself.

Ha. HA HA HA. Oh, John.

John did have a good job. Too bad he routinely bet his entire paycheck on sports. Thank DEITY he was either very good or very lucky.

The cleaning up bit? Oh, that was just because he knew that's what we wanted to hear. The reality was that he was the biggest slob ever. Cleaning was women's work and he was a man. ::Chest thump::

His job provided breakfast and lunch so he never went grocery shopping. Why would he do that when he could just eat our food? We had MANY conversations about that but he just ignored us. It got so bad, we had to keep the non-perishables in our rooms.

One time, I bought some special ingredients to make a treat for coworkers. When I went to make the dessert, half of the chocolate I needed was gone. I confronted John who said, "Well, you didn't tell me NOT to eat it!" I never knew was 'seeing red' meant until that moment. It was true that I didn't tell him not to eat it but it was IN MY ROOM.

He liked to leave pots of our food he cooked out so we could clean it up. He also had a really hard time with aim, so cleaning the bathroom was always a treat. He refused to clean it up himself and we just couldn't stand not to. I was vacuuming in my room one day and he got angry because it was interrupting his football game. (That was the day we discovered his gambling habit. It wasn't looking good and he was...tense.)

He belonged to X Religion and often preached to Beth and me that we were going straight to Hell because we were of Y religion (same basic religion, different flavors) and we occasionally went on dates with boys. But on the weekends he didn't go home to his girlfriend, it was a constant parade of ladies.

It was always so awkward to walk into the kitchen on Sunday morning to see a half naked girl we'd never been introduced to rummaging through our fridge. I didn't care if he wanted to sleep with half of the city but the hypocrisy and double standard was disgusting. I'm sure his girlfriend back home would have been pretty disgusted too.

I think the straw that broke the camel's back was the $$$ phone bill we got. The utilities were in Beth's name and we just split them accordingly. The phone bill was split with basic service and then any calls you made, you paid for.

One weekend, we both happened to be out of town and John had a big party. We know because we came back on Sunday evening to find the house completely trashed and John nowhere to be found. We were both pretty mad and talked about how we weren't going to renew the lease once it was up because of John and other reasons. And of course, we had to clean it up, the place reeked of booze and cigarettes.

A couple of weeks later, I came home to find Beth in a rage. It was scary, I'd never seen her like that before. It turns out that on the weekend we were away, one of John's friends called some s*x line overseas. For an HOUR. We confronted him and his response was "::shrug:: So? Whaddaya want me to do about it? Joe is a jerk." Our phone bill was in the neighborhood of $600, which we didn't have the means to pay. (Normally it was around $30-$50)

Beth told him that someone was going to pay this bill and it wasn't going to be her and it wasn't going to be me. I don't remember how we accomplished this but he got his friend to pony up. Things were tense after that, with us being the hags trying to ruin his life.

We told him of our plans to not renew the lease and he responded by skipping out one day a month before the lease was up. We got stuck with his part of the rent, phone, lights and cable but since he neglected to leave a forwarding address, we couldn't send his security deposit. So we figured he either meant for that to happen or he's just a jerk wondering where we ran off to.

In university, I shared the main floor of a house with three other roommates. At some point, two of the roomies, James and Annie, started dating. Suddenly, they wanted the living room to watch tv as a "date night", so we couldn't be in the common area. They also started baby-talking to each other all.the.time. **shudder**

We talked the landlady into giving us laundry privileges after we'd all lived there for 2 years. She let us do laundry on the weekends, but only until 5 pm. As soon as she unlocked the door, James & Annie started their laundry. This is all fine, but they knew I worked 12 - 5 on the weekends and had asked if I could get my stuff done before I left for work. Each week, they'd say "Oh yeah, we forgot!" but it was always the same.

Then James decided he should learn how to start cooking. So one day, I come home to my boning knife, and a gruesomely dismembered chicken on my wooden cutting board, and no James or Annie to be found. After an hour, they came back from their trip to the grocery store and James says: "Your boning knife doesn't go through bones very well. I had to hit it several times with the rolling pin to get it to go through." I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

I explained to him what a boning knife's for, and he just shrugged and said: "oops." I told him I expected him to clean my cutting board properly after the chicken had been on it for so long. His solution (after I'd left for work) was to fill the unwashed bathtub with water and bleach and soak my cutting board in it for several hours. Of course the board warped. When I called him on it (very timidly, after all, we were "friends"), again he shrugged and said "Oops".

After that, things spiraled down hill fairly quickly, and we (me and the 4th roommate) moved out.

Things were tense after that, with us being the hags trying to ruin his life.

Where do these folks come from who think it's perfectly acceptable to treat everyone around them like trash but one well-deserved cross word, and they're the VICTIM, and you're just so meeeeaaaan?

And from the sound of it, whatever denomination he's in either 1) is one which views women in a way similar to how they were seen during biblical times, or 2) that's just what he listens to/how he interprets it cause it sounds good and allows him to treat women poorly and sleep at night.

Logged

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here. Be cheerful, strive to be happy. -Desiderata

This story isn't a roommate from hell story, but it is a roommate story, at least.

One of my roommates in college was Laura. She was a decent sort and we got along just fine. At the time, I had three cats. Somehow or another Laura had reached early adulthood without having any exposure to cats at all, which led to some amusing incidents.

One of the kitties cuddled up next to Laura on the sofa while she was studying, so she started petting him. I was quite startled when she suddenly jumped up from the sofa with a squeal. When I asked what was wrong, she said kitty had started growling at her. Concerned, I walked over to kitty and petted him, only to hear her say, "Oh no...he's doing it again!" He was purring. Loudly.

My favorite incident was the time she approached me, visibly nervous, saying we needed to have a talk. She looked quite serious about it and I couldn't imagine what she wanted to talk about, as everything seemed to be going just fine. She started off in a rambling manner, talking about the way she was raised and her values and such, then finally said that she didn't like drug use at all and wasn't comfortable having drugs in the house. Well, me neither. In fact, to this day I've never used any illegal drugs at all and have never been drunk. Not my thing at all.

So what prompted the talk? She'd opened one of my desk drawers to look for a pen (not a problem at all - she had permission) and had found a plastic bag full of catnip. It was even labelled "catnip" but she'd never heard of the stuff and assumed it was pot.

This story isn't a roommate from hell story, but it is a roommate story, at least.

One of my roommates in college was Laura. She was a decent sort and we got along just fine. At the time, I had three cats. Somehow or another Laura had reached early adulthood without having any exposure to cats at all, which led to some amusing incidents.

One of the kitties cuddled up next to Laura on the sofa while she was studying, so she started petting him. I was quite startled when she suddenly jumped up from the sofa with a squeal. When I asked what was wrong, she said kitty had started growling at her. Concerned, I walked over to kitty and petted him, only to hear her say, "Oh no...he's doing it again!" He was purring. Loudly.

My favorite incident was the time she approached me, visibly nervous, saying we needed to have a talk. She looked quite serious about it and I couldn't imagine what she wanted to talk about, as everything seemed to be going just fine. She started off in a rambling manner, talking about the way she was raised and her values and such, then finally said that she didn't like drug use at all and wasn't comfortable having drugs in the house. Well, me neither. In fact, to this day I've never used any illegal drugs at all and have never been drunk. Not my thing at all.

So what prompted the talk? She'd opened one of my desk drawers to look for a pen (not a problem at all - she had permission) and had found a plastic bag full of catnip. It was even labelled "catnip" but she'd never heard of the stuff and assumed it was pot.

LOL!! I suppose it would be a little unnerving to be seated next to a heartily purring kitty, if one hadn't experienced that before! That's also funny about the catnip. (My cats act like crackheads rather than stoners when I give it to them, though!) I bet your kitties made a kitty lover for life of Laura.

Junior year of college, in the dorms... I was put in temporary housing with about 11 other girls, which you would think would have been the "hell" part. Nope, it was GREAT! We had a great time, everyone was pretty respectful of each other, and many of us became pretty good friends. It was about 3 weeks before I got assigned to a room (that's when the college knows for sure that a particular student is not going to show up). That's when the fun began.

I got my room assignment, but apparently my new roommate had not bothered to get her mail, or answer her phone, so she had no idea that she was getting a roommate at all before I showed up. That was awesome, by the way. I stopped by to introduce myself, and she basically slammed the door in my face. It didn't get much better from there, despite my efforts to be friendly and accommodating.

When I moved in, I found that she had disassembled my bed. Remember, classes had been in session for 3 weeks at this point, so I was trying to move in at a point when I had projects, homework, work, and exams. There is nothing like working super hard to move in a short window between classes, and then not even having a bed to sleep in without assembling it first (I have no idea how she got it apart on her own, but it took three of us to put it back together, as it was very heavy steel). I also had an 8 am class. I was exhausted by the time I finally got the bed assembled and could crash.

At one point, she locked me out of the room, and I had to get an RA to force her to let me in. She had no particular reason for doing so, other than the fact that she just didn't want a roommate.

She had taken all three sections of the closet, and seemed surprised that I actually wanted to use one of the sections. She tried to get me to give her half of my ONE closet section! Nope, not happening. I had to cram everything I owned into that one section, as we didn't have dressers. We had three small drawers, and the rest of the main cabinet was open shelving. My underwear lived in my bottom desk drawer for awhile, because I didn't have room to assemble my folding cardboard storage unit, and she was slow to clear out a single drawer for me to use.

She was supposedly pre-med, but she never went to class. She slept most of the day, and did copious amounts of catalog shopping (This was 20+ years ago. I shudder to think what it would have been like now, with online shopping.). She was almost always in the room, which meant that I seldom had privacy. I took to hanging out with a book in the basement, just to get some privacy.

She would have lengthy phone conversations at 2 or 3 in the morning with her parents overseas in Japan, almost every night. She would sob during these conversations. She did not want to be there at all. They would not let her drop out. She was trying to fail out so she could go home.

She did NOT SLEEP AT NIGHT. Therefore, I barely slept at all, because I still went to classes and worked, and had projects. By golly, though, if I needed to be working in the room during the time she slept (all day, remember), it was the end of the world. She did not want me to study in the room at all, and complained quite a bit when I finally refused to study elsewhere, because I was sick of always having to be the one to leave when I was paying just as much for the room as she was.

I also couldn't use my blowdryer in the room because it was too noisy. I ended up figuring out how to use the hand dryers in the bathroom to dry my hair (we had a bunch at a higher level than usual, so I think that they were actually intended to dry hair).

She washed her feet in the sink nightly. We were right across the hall from the showers, which I dunno... is a more appropriate place to wash your feet than the sink that we did dishes in, but what do I know, right? My bed was by the sink, so she would rest her foot on my footboard while she did whatever it was that she did. I was usually in bed at the time, which made it even weirder than it sounds.

Speaking of dishes... She didn't actually do her dishes. They piled up under the sink. I had a meal plan that covered most of my meals, so I generally just had a cup or two to wash at a time. I was not going to wash her dishes.

She would use my microwave at odd hours of the night. Like at 3 am, again. The microwave was right by my bed. I had asked her repeatedly to please not use it after midnight, because I had early classes. One night, I had finally had it. I had a sinus infection, and a final at 7:30 am. I had finally gotten to sleep at around midnight. 4am, she starts microwaving something. I lost it. I also couldn't get back to sleep. I swear I aced that final because I was too furious to fail.

I moved out after finals. I didn't bother telling her until I was actually moving out, which I'll admit was mean, but I really had had it. A friend needed a roommate at a different dorm. The same day that she woke me up at 4 by using my microwave, I went to the housing office and filled out the paperwork for a transfer, right after my final. When my Dad came to pick me up for Christmas Break, we moved all my things to the new dorm. She came in as we were moving my stuff, I shook her hand, told her it was nice to have met her, I was moving out, and we left. I heard later that she just couldn't understand why I left, as we got along so well.

The funny thing is, right after the first week of living with her (during which I had gotten almost no sleep, due to her flipped schedule), a good friend from temp housing got assigned a room 2 doors down. Her roommate was best friends with my roommate. We got together with them and proposed a swap. They refused, as they didn't want to live together because "it would ruin their friendship"... Her friend was much more adjusted to college life, and probably knew exactly how awful it would be living with my roommate.

Darling, you are a true hero for being classy about all of that. I would have snapped after 2 weeks, moved some of her crap so that I had half of the room, unplugged my microwave and dared her to plug it back in, and used the hair dryer if I darned well pleased if it was during waking hours.

I also would have been labeled the unreasonable one and gotten in trouble, because that's how these things go.

I'd had a few "winners" in college and law school, but nothing too terrible. After I landed my first job I used a roommate referral service to find a place to live, and wound up in a two bedroom apartment with another young woman I will call Lauren.

At first Lauren and I got along well. Three months after I moved in, Lauren had an argument with the landlady. Next thing I knew, we were served with eviction papers. The landlady offered to rent the apartment to me after Lauren moved out, but I chose to find another apartment with Lauren.

After we moved, however . . .

I have to admit, I'm somewhat of a slob. I tried very hard to contain the mess to my own room. Occasionally I'd slip up and she would become very upset. Understandable, of course. She was terrified we would get a cockroach infestation if the place were not kept spotless.

But what she did that one time . . .

I went out of town one summer weekend. I forgot to take out the trash before I left. Came home and found it all piled up in the middle of my bedroom floor. So mature. Fortunately there were no bugs . . . Though I doubt the bugs would have stayed in my room. . .

The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, though . . .

As I said, she feared an infestation. Wrapped all of her non perishables in plastic to keep out the bugs before placing them in the cabinets. One day she bought a 5 pound bag of flour, wrapped it in plastic, and placed it in one of the cabinets. Usually we kept food in the cabinets over the countertop and kept our pots and pan in the cabinets under the counter, but for some reason she put the flour in the pot cabinet.

She was away for the weekend, and I hadn't bothered to cook all weekend. I got up Sunday morning with plans to cook breakfast for my fiance, opened up the pot cabinet and discovered that mice had been partying with Lauren's flour. There were floury footprints and other evidence of their enjoyment on every pot and pan we owned.

So I spent my entire Sunday emptying cabinets, cleaning cabinets and washing pots and pans. It was dinner time and I was still in my bathrobe, reorganizing the pots and pans, when she came home.

I told her what had happened, and her only comment was "Well, did you go downstairs and tell the landlord?"

When I said "no", she rolled her eyes and went downstairs.

The landlord came up with glue traps. One mouse got caught in a trap that night, and cried all night. Right outside Lauren's door.

Freshman year and she is assigned to live in an on-campus apartment. Nice apartment, with 3 bedrooms and two bathrooms. It's designed for 6 students, but because housing is limited at this school, 8 freshmen girls will live in this apartment.

Because we now live in an age of Facebook and a Twitter and texting, the girls all chat before school starts, and it looks like everyone is going to get along.

Wrong.

One girl didn't make it through freshman orientation. She started crying the moment her parents dropped her off, and didn't stop until they picked her up three days later. I can only guess what would have happened if her parents didn't come for her.

At some point my daughter's roommate found a boyfriend. Suddenly my daughter was getting text messages along the lines of "find a place to sleep tonight." Usually these messages would show up on her phone around midnight, as she was headed home.

Eventually the situation deteriorated. My daughter would be sitting at her desk doing work. Roommate and boyfriend would be there, too. Daughter would get up to go to the bathroom or get something from the kitchen, and they would lock her out of the bedroom.

The kicker is, the boyfriend lived two floors away, and had his own bedroom, no roommate.

The other girls all got along -- with each other. My daughter was the odd girl out. That didn't stop them from using her stuff.

The apartment had a single hookup for cable tv. My daughter brought the tv, and they all shared it. One day my daughter came home to find that someone's boyfriend had hooked up his laptop to the tv so that he could stream some show he wanted to watch.

She'd frequently find her pots, pans and dishes used and unwashed and sitting in the sink. What drove her over the edge, though, was how one of the girls ruined a frying pan -- apparently she had no idea you can't use metal utensils on a nonstick surface, and she used a knife to cut up her food while it was still in the pan.

But the best story?

My daughter attends a Catholic university. Many of the faculty are priests. Some of them are housed in the same apartment building as the students. My daughter's next-door neighbor was not only a faculty member and priest, but the Dean of Students himself.

So it came as no surprise that when one of the apartment mates decided to bake brownies with a secret herbal ingredient, she got caught. The R.A. showed up to deal with the situation, but I suspect it's because the Dean called her. I think the consequences would have been more severe if the Dean had to handle it himself.

My daughter was upset when the other girls told her the 6 of them wanted to live together sophomore year and she would have to find another group to live with. They did her a favor, as it turns out. She had a better number in the housing lottery than they did, got a nicer apartment, and wound up living with a girl who is now one of her closest friends.